"It's probably important for him and for football," the former Newcastle United striker said. "I'm sure the owners will back him. In a way they have backed him now with the two-week suspension, that buys everyone a little time to see what they can or can't do."

He added: "There's no excuse for him saying: 'I'm not going on to a football pitch.' Mancini is in a position now – and it looks as if the owners have backed him and rightly so. They have to back him because if they don't back him, there's no future for Mancini, is there? Because he has come out and said: 'He'll never play for this football club again.'"

Asked what support the Italian should have, the BBC pundit Shearer said: "Giving Mancini the power to do whatever he wants. He might want to do a lot more different with him than he actually can. That's the situation managers are in now. He's sitting on a £35m, £40m investment [who] is on God knows how much a week, and wherever he goes he isn't going to get that off anyone else.

"There's only one club in the world that can discard him because of the wealth that they have and that's Man City."

Shearer pointed to the pressure increased player power can have on managers. "It's changed incredibly. It's incredible but different managers have different styles don't they? It was fascinating to see how Fergie [Sir Alex Ferguson] handled the [Wayne] Rooney situation," he said, regarding the Manchester United striker declaring he wanted to leave the club in autumn last year.

"I thought it was sensational in the way he handled it, how calm he was, what he said, what he'd done and it's as if that has never happened. But it's different now because Mancini has gone on record to say this guy will never play for me again."

Shearer was famously selected on the bench by Ruud Gullit when Newcastle played Sunderland in August 1999 yet he did take the field when asked to by the Dutchman. "I was put on the bench and I went on. I understand the frustration, the anger that players feel because, yeah, it could get personal absolutely. But you're still employed, you're still getting paid, you've still got to go out and do whatever," he said.